Thursday, June 22, 2017

In all my comments on this I talked around the obvious. I've said it elsewhere dozens of times but it's so front and center here it just slipped by.

Schutz and Neel are called artists. Jordan Peele is a comedian. Neel's success is still the success of the observer, the success of the philosophical, collaborative model associated with fine art and academia, but of an older aristocratic tradition (Hilton Als is no leftist). Neel succeeds in observing the other through sympathy and friendship, not ideas. Smith should have written about her. Peele's comedic adversarialism says "fuck you" to the laziness of white bourgeois assumption, not to Neel and to elite, leisurely, openness and curiosity. True bohemians model themselves aristocrats. That solves none of the problems of aristocratic art, of which Neel remains a practitioner. But Neel is from an older tradition and she's dead.

Get Out is the answer to Hannah Black's self-rightous bourgeois moralizing. Get Out is the necessary criticism of Open Casket.

We have been warned not to get under one another’s skin, to keep our distance. But Jordan Peele’s horror-fantasy—in which we are inside one another’s skin and intimately involved in one another’s suffering—is neither a horror nor a fantasy. It is a fact of our experience. The real fantasy is that we can get out of one another’s way, make a clean cut between black and white, a final cathartic separation between us and them. For the many of us in loving, mixed families, this is the true impossibility. There are people online who seem astounded that Get Out was written and directed by a man with a white wife and a white mother, a man who may soon have—depending on how the unpredictable phenotype lottery goes—a white-appearing child. But this is the history of race in America. Families can become black, then white, then black again within a few generations. And even when Americans are not genetically mixed, they live in a mixed society at the national level if no other. There is no getting out of our intertwined history.

The Root: Get Out Proves That ‘Nice Racism’ and White Liberalism Are Never to Be TrustedNational Review: Fear of a White VillageBreitbart: Jordan Peele’s Horror Movie ‘Get Out’ Casts ‘Liberal Elite’ as the MonsterNYMag: Jordan Peele’s Genius New Horror Movie Shows the Terror of Being Black in World Full of White People

Breitbart and NYM use the same quote quote from Peele.

“It was very important to me for this not to be about a black guy going to the South and going to this red state where the presumption for a lot of people is everybody’s racist there,” Peele told the audience after the film’s midnight screening. “This was meant to take a stab at the liberal elite that tends to believe that ‘We’re above these things.'”

Can a film be too inflammatory for its own good, or are there times, and places, when only fire will suffice? In an interview with the Times, Peele, whose mother is white, admitted that the movie was originally intended “to combat the lie that America had become post-racial,” and the result is like an all-out attack on a rainbow. Short of making us listen to “Ebony and Ivory” over the closing credits, “Get Out” could hardly be more provocative. There’s a scene with a head-stamping, a scene with an exposed brain, and a truly creepy scene with a bowl of Froot Loops. And yet, despite all that, what makes this horror film horrific is the response that it gives to the well-meaning and problem-solving question “Can’t we just learn to live together?” To which the movie answers, loud and clear, “No.”